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Tuesday, June 17, 2014

FamilySearch Family Tree Hints Now Showing on Tablet

Guest post by Amy Tanner Thiriot

FamilySearch announced at the end of May that it would be adding a "hints" feature to Family Tree. I pulled up Family Tree this afternoon on my tablet and saw the new hints. I had just been working on my desktop and hadn't seen it, so I checked back there and didn't see any, so this great new feature is currently on my tablet but not desktop version of Family Tree. I imagine it will be coming soon to the desktop version of Family Tree.

Here is a quick example of the Record Hints feature.

My fourth great-grandfather Joseph George Defriez (1821-1887) worked for many decades as a parish doctor and surgeon in London's East End. He provided primary care, did surgery, attended women in childbirth, did postmortem examinations for murders, and provided medical care during cholera epidemics.

His entry has already been sourced, but FamilySearch came up with an additional recommendation.

I clicked on the link and reviewed the source. The name and date and place of his marriage to Mary Ann Godfrey were all correct, so I added the source to Joseph's entry.

With that source processed, his Record Hints section now says, "There are no pending record hints for this person."

This is what his entry looks like right now on my desktop computer, with the new source added and no Record Hints section showing yet.

Now that I've figured out how that works, I'm mostly going to leave the hints alone so other relatives can have the experience of adding sources to entries, and then when I get my weekly email of changes to watched entries, I'll review the added sources and make sure they're correct.

Just to clear up any confusion. We began with 50% of users seeing the feature to ensure it was working ok. Logging in on different browsers/devices counted as a separate "user" which is why you saw it on some and not others. Anyhow, this feature is now on for all users. To give you a little preview of things to come, we're hoping to add indicators of pending record hints on the descendancy view sometime next week.